TALK: The Green Mountain College Blog

A few minutes after hanging up the phone, Evan was at my house and we were on the road. We were headed toward Clough State Park, home of the Everett Dam, among other things, located in Dunbarton, NH (only fifteen minutes or so from my house). Though the park itself is closed (and has been for the past two years due to heavy flooding) there are still paths around the park that are open to the public. Neither of us had ever been on them before; in fact, I didn't even know of their existence until a couple weeks ago. So, being the great explorers that we are, Evan and I decided to venture on and discover what the park's paths had to offer.

And so the day began, Evan with his small backpack filled with the necessities (really just a lot of water), and I with my camera, prepared to make some memories.

Here I am patiently waiting for Evan to get all his stuff out of the car and playing with my own shadow. Yeah. I know. I'm pretty mature:

I have aptly named the following picture "Prepared" on my computer, as it signified that Evan and I were finally ready to set out. Note the backpack and the water. YES.

So we meandered across the top of the dam, passed this cute little gazebo, went down this slight hill, and wandered up another path that went up a hill. We noted that the trees in this area grew in perfectly straight rows, as if someone had planted them to recover the area. This is actually entirely possible, since there are a number of restoration projects going on in the park, and there was a devestating flood in 1938 that destroyed the park. We wandered around a little bit more, stopping at the things we saw that were noteworthy. One of these was a huge tree that actually had smaller trees stuck in its upper limbs!! Yeah. That's how high the flood water got in this area.

We ended up coming to a bit of a dead end in our explorations, so we half-slid, half-climbed down this hill and ended up on a sand bar that crossed a large part of the lake that had been created by the dam. It eventually led us to what I can only describe as a small peninsula. That is where we found this:

Flood damage, what? Man oh man. Nature amazes me.

Even the sand looked cool in this area! There were so many layers!! :

Once we walked back from the peninsula, we kept on following the sand bar, which led to another area. As we walked, we saw moose prints in the sand, and as it had rained the day before, we knew they had to be fresh. Though we followed them, we failed to find the moose. We did, however, get startled by a young buck who ran across our paths! We then decided to climb over the hill he had seemingly come from. It was pretty steep on the other side: once again, we half-slid half-climbed our way down. Along the way, I took some photos.

I really liked how orange these dead pine needles looked. I'm used to seeing them when they are really dark brown. The color was especially emphasized by all the green that surrounded it, so I needed to take a quick pic.

I took another with Evan in the picture, so the viewer could get an idea of the kind of slope we were headed down:

And another with a little bit of birch bark in there. I love birch trees (they also happen to be New Hampshire's state tree. Representin'!)

Once we slid down the hill, we came upon a semi-clearing, that had a bunch of brambles, and then a more swampy area. We saw a blue heron fly overhead right as we got there. The sky was so beautiful, and the birds so full of song, we decided to sit down and chat for a while right there.

And that's when I snapped these photos:

(So beautiful! May I remind you that it was one of the best days of my life??!! So unexpected! So brilliant!)

I was once told by an aunt that I would make a great foot model. I've never really understood the comment, but I decided I'd try and see what I could do. I don't think I succeeded in making my foot look any more appealing than most feet, so I've unofficially named the following picture: "When Feet Attack!!"

After failing to get my foot in a really good light, I took a shot at Evan's very much covered feet:

I'm starting to feel that this picture should be a commercial for K Swiss shoes. All they'd need is a motto underneath, which, if any of their representatives are reading this, I came up with, too. It is: "Want to be a real man?" This is sort of a joke I've got running with Evan, as the entire time we were walking around, Evan kept on making comments along the lines of: "MMmm, being outside makes me feel manly" or "MMMMm. I've got a stick in my hand. I feel manly," etc. So yeah. K Swiss? I've done the work for you. I expect a paycheck soon.

After hanging out in the brambles for a while, we headed back up the steep cliff, and headed back to the path we were originally on. We then decided to walk in the direction that we saw the original young buck run. Just as we rounded the corner, we saw two young bucks prancing around in this huge field of lupine and tall grasses, just as the sun was setting! The bucks were obviously playing, as they were jumped around and running after each other in circles. They heard us, however, and soon headed towards the woods. We consequently lost them. I did, however, stop to get my heart rate back to normal (the bucks scared me at first and then just amaaazed me) and take some pictures.

This is the field we saw the young bucks in:

Here's another picture that focuses mainly on how gorgeous the sky was at this point:

It was rather difficult to get the angles right, considering I was using the automatic function on the camera. This is when Evan stepped in and informed me that he was only a couple of classes away from having an associates in photography. Right. So here are a couple he took:

I've dubbed this picture: Mister Mastermind, partially to poke fun at Evan. It actually is a really nice picture-- and he did it all in the manual setting of the camera, which I have yet to figure out.

Mister Mastermind strikes again!! :

I took the following picture--I really like silhouettes. This tree was begging to be caught on camera.

We continued to walk along the path that ran parallel with the field. As we kept on walking, we heard running water in the distance. Now as we had already passed the lake that had been formed by the dam, we were curious as to what or where this running water was coming from. So we followed the sound down to a river.

Here's the river we found. Very pretty:

Here's a picture of some of the new growth on the trees down by the river we found. I've entitled it "New Hope," as all of the trees in this area were half dead, obviously from the floods that have hit recently. Even so, the trees are struggling to continue their survival.

We ended up crossing the river at one point, and followed it upstream for a while. We discovered that the land we were walking on actually divided the river in half-- there was running water on the other side, too. We tried to find a place to cross this part of the river, but were unable to because the river was way too fast and wide. Eventually we crossed back to the original side of the river we were on and followed it more upstream for a while. We then decided to end our little adventure, as it was starting to get dark and we didn't have any flashlights.

So a million bug bites, two deer sightings, a bad sunburn, a handful of memories, and six hours later, we returned to civilization. Just as we were leaving the park, we took a picture of the small peninsula that we had been on, as the sun was really setting.

And that was that. A wonderful, wonderful day.